Detecting and Preventing DoS/DDoS Attacks through Monitoring and Limiting Malicious Traffic

As cyber threats continue to evolve, online systems are at significant danger from Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack included disrupting services and disable to access for legitimate users. These attacks use to overwhelm the network by sending high volume of malicious request, resulting in server downtime and substantial operational costs. Dos attack, which is a single source that generates the disruptive traffic, while DDoS attacks uses multiple sources named handlers and zombies to overwhelm target, exploiting system resources and causing legitimate users to experience downtime. This paper introduces solution to mitigate and prevent DoS-DDoS attack by implementing real-time request monitoring, rate limiting and traffic redirection. In order to protect server resources for authorized users and lower the possibility of service interruption, the system redirect suspected users to a verification page when it detects unusual request rates, which are frequently an indication of DDoS activity. leveraging lightweight scripting in the Nginx framework to speed up response times and increase attack resilience, this approach offers a scalable and adaptable way to mitigate DoS/DDoS attacks. This paper shows that proactive rate limitation and traffic redirection offer a potential way to combat the increasing sophistication and frequency of DDoS attacks by improving real-time traffic control.